When Randy Rakes left his mother’s home near midnight last year to walk to his best friend’s house, he stood atop the front steps and said he was on his way to the top.
Two months earlier, in order to rid himself of a nasty addiction to heroin, he hardly ate, drank or slept. He was looking forward to getting his life on track, said Jeanne Blizzard, his mother.
But she didn’t know what to expect that night.
An hour or two later, state troopers descended on her home. They told her Randy was dead, and asked if he was suicidal, because, they said, he jumped in front of a passing police cruiser on Route 140.
Nearly a year later, Blizzard finally received her answers. A police crash team investigation report recently received by her attorney, David Ellin, shows that Trooper Dale Derr, 22, was driving 83 mph in a 55 mph zone in Finksburg when he struck Rakes, who was walking along the shoulder.
Blizzard filed a $15 million lawsuit in March and believes the report will help win it.
“This was a man willing to go through hell to be a good person,” Blizzard said. “If he wanted to commit suicide, he would have done it in the three weeks he was lying in that bed.”
Blizzard says her son told workers at Carroll Hospital months earlier that he was suicidal so they would admit him for his addiction.
Rakes’ blood-alcohol content was .14 that night, but Blizzard and Ellin say the crash investigation shows he did not jump in front of the cruiser.
Blizzard says she is going to the attorney general next week if involuntary manslaughter charges aren’t brought against Derr, who was off-duty at the time, not on his way to assist in a burglary call, as he initially said, according to the report.
State police declined to comment, and the state’s attorney in Frederick County, where Carroll officials transferred the incident, did not return calls for comment.
